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Neural Destiny
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17316 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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2 / 1990 |
1,987 Words |
| Author
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Benjamin Libet
Benjamin Libet is a neuroscientist in the physiology
department of the University of California at San Francisco. |
It is an ancient and persistent question, perhaps never more adroitly framed than in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in the fifth century B.C. The play's harrowing prophecy, delivered by the oracle at Delphi, is that the hero will someday slay his father and marry his mother. Oedipus, hearing of this destiny, determines to escape by fleeing his home in Corinth. At a crossroads, he quarrels with a traveler over the right-of-way and ends up killing the man. Soon afterward, he arrives in Thebes, where, after saving the city from a murderous monster, the Sphinx, he is crowned king and marries the widowed queen Jocasta.
Two decades later, Oedipus learns the truth: his real parents are not the couple who raised him but the man he killed at the crossroads (who was King Laius of Thebes in disguise) and Queen Jocasta. For all his willful striving, Oedipus realizes that the gods, not he, have determined his lot. In horror, he gouges out his eyes.
The question posed by Sophocles' drama goes to the heart of what it is to be human: Are we autonomous individuals who have some say in what we do, or are our thoughts and behaviors determined by outside forces? Like Sophocles, the earliest philosophers leaned toward the view that the gods control man's actions, a belief that reached its culmination during the seventeenth century, in the writings of the Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. Spinoza believed that if man seemed capable of making up his mind, it was only an illusion, for all matter and thought are attributes of God and thus are determined by Him.
The opposing view was advanced in the second century B.C., by the Hebrew authors of the Old Testament.
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